Header menu

Languages

EYE Prize

Winners

Marking a collaboration between EYE, the Dutch film museum and the Paddy and Joan Leigh Fermor Arts Fund since 2015, the EYE Art & Film Prize is set to highlight the intricate relation between contemporary art and film. In April 2018, Belgian/Mexican artist Francis Alÿs won the fourth EYE Art & Film Prize. Previous winners of the prestigious prize are German artist Hito Steyerl in 2015, UK based filmmaker Ben Rivers in 2016 and Chinese artist/filmmaker Wang Bing 2017.

The annual 25,000 GBP prize is to fund the making of new work by a living artist. The aim of the prize is to support and promote the artist or filmmaker whose work unites art and film, and demonstrates quality of thought, imagination and artistic excellence.

With the undeniable intimate relationship between the moving image and contemporary arts, it is about time for a prize for work that brings these two art forms together. EYE is delighted that the PJLF Arts Fund has made the creation of this prize possible, and, with our additional commitment to stage an exhibition every four years of the three previous years’ EYE Prize winners, EYE will cement its position as a leading and international institution for film and art- Sandra den Hamer, CEO of EYE

An international jury consisting of prominent figures from the worlds of art and cinema will select the recipient. The selection will be made on the basis of the recipient's body of work—an artist who is developing a significant oeuvre. The first EYE Prize winners’ exhibition will take place in 2018.

Artists/filmmakers cannot apply for The EYE Art & Film Prize, it’s not an open call. The international advisory board will make the selection of nominated candidates for the EYE Art & Film Prize to present to the EYE Prize jury. The winner will be announced at the annual EYE Gala on April 5, 2018, to coincide with the EYE’s fifth anniversary.

Film, arguably the most dynamic of all the arts, only came into being in the late 19th century. In the late 1920s, artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Luis Buñuel and Hans Richter, averse to the commercial expressions of film, recognised the possibilities of film as a medium for their art. It would not be until the 1960s that cinema would play again such an important role in art, when artists such as Andy Warhol, Anthony McCall and Michael Snow gave film the status of museum art.

The medium of film made its definitive breakthrough in the arts in the mid-nineties. Taking advantage of the digital revolution, inexpensive video projectors and advancing technology, a new generation of artists saw film and moving images as a perfect means of expression for their era. Artists such as Douglas Gordon, Steve McQueen, Fiona Tan and Isaac Julian, Aernout Mik, Pipilotti Rist and many others moved the 'white box' into a 'black box'.

Today, the landscape of the moving image continues to open up and reveal that an increasing large number of filmmakers are also liberating themselves from the confines of the cinema and discovering the possibilities of the three-dimensional exhibition space. Vast, exuberant installations covering several screens, but also small and intimate presentations with a single screen or LCD monitor as part of a multimedia installation, and all things in between, demonstrate that the fringe between Art and Film has come of age.

The PJLF Arts Fund was established in 2011 with a view to helping artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians. Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011) was a celebrated British writer. His wife, Joan Eyres Monsell (1911–2003), was a professional photographer. Both their archives are housed at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.